Hong Kong, October 21 : The ground forces of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has traditionally been the strongest and most numerical in China’s military. Chairman Xi Jinping has been working hard to drag the PLA, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the modern era. This included shedding 300,000 soldiers and officers in a restructure announced by Xi at a military parade in Tiananmen Square in September 2015.
These thousands upon thousands of troops were dismissed from 2015-18, in a move designed to make the PLA Ground Force leaner. It is believed the army now makes up slightly less than half the PLA’s two million members. Nonetheless, despite the cull, China’s communist party-controlled PLA remains the largest military force in the world.
The modernization of the PLA is perhaps better described as being deliberate rather than rapid. The overarching aims of the ongoing restructuring are, in the words of the government, “to basically complete national defense and military modernization by 2035”, and achieve a “world-class military” by 2049.
A major restructuring in 2016 saw the PLA establish five theater commands to promote joint operations, as a replacement for the seven previous military regions. The five theaters are known as the Eastern, Southern, Western, Northern, and Central.
The PLA also created its Strategic Support Force in December 2015 to focus on the increasingly important cyber, electronic warfare, and space domains as the PLA modernized into a digital force. However, the Strategic Support Force was disestablished and morphed into the Information Support Force in April 2024.
ANI asked Dennis Blasko, a former US defense attaché in Beijing and Hong Kong in the 1990s, and a prominent expert on the PLA, about these reforms.
He explained: “The PLA has now been operating joint headquarters in the Central Military Commission (CMC) and at the five theaters for about a decade. These joint headquarters and their joint operations command centers, in conjunction with the service headquarters, seem to be functioning well enough to maintain PLA operational readiness training and to conduct routine operations in the East China Sea around Taiwan, in the South China Sea, along the Line of Actual Control with India, in the Gulf of Aden and on multiple overseas United Nations peacekeeping missions.” Blasko said this was so in spite of serious gaps in many senior leadership positions (such as theater leaders and CMC members). Many of these gaps are due to widespread detentions under Xi’s vigorous anti-corruption campaign."
“Though they have not planned and executed combat operations,” Blasko explained, “the joint headquarters have maintained the force’s operations tempo and undoubtedly are learning from the experience in sustaining these various missions, several of which truly are joint.” This is especially true in the East China Sea where the PLA is incorrigibly threatening Taiwan, and in the South China Sea where China coerces and bullies competing territorial claimants such as the Philippines.
Apart from the aforementioned massive 300,000 redundancies, Blasko pointed out that the PLA Ground Force has decreased in size marginally for another reason too. This is because roughly seven brigades were transferred to the PLA Navy Marine Corps (PLANMC) over the past decade. The PLANMC now has a total of eleven brigades: eight marine brigades, two special operations forces brigades and one aviation brigade.
Blasko stated, “Along with the commissioning of numerous large amphibious ships (eight Type 071, four Type 075 and one Type 076 vessels), the PLANMC appears to be the PLA’s primary expeditionary force, while the army maintains its amphibious assault mission for Taiwan and the security of its land borders.”
The security of China’s frontiers is the responsibility of border defense units permanently stationed along the entirety of China’s periphery.
In fact, the American expert estimates that these Chinese border defense units, which are separate from mobile operational units in group armies, or the divisions and brigades stationed in Xinjiang and Tibet, number well over 100,000 personnel. This means these border troops comprise a significant component of the total PLA Ground Force. Showing just how tricky it is to accurately number the size of the PLA Ground Force, it has benefited from an expansion in the number of non-active-duty uniformed civilians who work mainly in non-combatant billets, on staffs at all levels (except for battalions) and in academic, medical, political, logistics, equipment maintenance and procurement, and other non-combat roles.
Blasko noted, “The exact number of this category of personnel has not been announced officially, but likely is in the high tens or low hundreds of thousands of personnel, and who are not counted as part of the two million active-duty PLA.” These noncombatants serve in all services of the PLA, and it demonstrates that the oft-quoted figure of two million PLA members is perhaps disingenuous.
Digging deeper into PLA Ground Force changes, Blasko highlighted the following. “The army now has about ten years of experience assigning combined arms battalions and support battalions independent missions that are planned and executed by their own organic battalion leaders and staffs, while operating under brigade or regimental command.” 
This is in contrast to the former, rigid, Soviet-style regimental system in which operations were planned and supported by regimental headquarters, and battalion commanders and political instructors mainly followed orders and executed the plans passed down to them.
Blasko shared, “Battalions now have a chief of staff, a senior battalion non-commissioned officer (NCO) and a small staff of company-grade officers and NCOs to assist the battalion commander and political instructor (and their deputies) in planning, controlling and sustaining their own operations while keeping their higher headquarters informed of their actions.”
This all contributes to more initiative being taken in combat units compared to before. Of course, however, the hierarchical PLA, which is kept under strict centralized control under Xi himself, can never hope to compete with the freedom that officers in the West have to perform their missions.
Blasko said that, because of the complexity of combined arms operations, lieutenant colonels now fill many, if not most, battalion commander and political instructor billets. Previously, it was only majors who were battalion commanders. “This means these leaders now have roughly four more years of experience to draw upon to perform their more difficult jobs,” Blasko said. This greater level of experience can only have a positive impact on proficiency.
What about the PLA’s equipment then? It is difficult to keep up with the bewildering array of new equipment that the PLA has, and how rapidly it is being modernized. However, the first point that Blasko made is that the army “has been expanding its long-range multiple launch rocket force with the addition of PCH191 units capable of ranging Taiwan from the mainland. It also appears to be very serious about its short-range air defense systems, against both manned and unmanned threats, with multiple types of counter-drone weapons in experimentation and fielded.”
Meanwhile, main battle tanks have been observed training with overhead protection to shield them from drone attacks, just as Russia has done with its so-called “cope cages” in Ukraine.
Blasko also stated, “Army units appear to have organic, sufficient engineering capabilities to construct camouflaged and protected, dug-in field positions, though they need to concentrate more on overhead protection for their field fortifications. Engineer units are also responsible for constructing and employing decoys.”
The American analyst highlighted that, apart from the small and medium unmanned systems that the PLA has traditionally employed for close-in reconnaissance and target acquisition, the army is “experimenting with a wide variety of robotic land vehicles and small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that can be launched and operated in swarms. However, it is unclear if the Army leadership has decided at what level to integrate large swarm capabilities and other modern unmanned systems into the force structure.”
UAVs have long been used by infantry and artillery units, but it is difficult to say at what level and in what sizes different new systems will be assigned to operational and support units.
It is also pertinent to point out that it has become even more difficult to study the PLA. This is because, sometime after 2020, the Chinese government and the PLA made a deliberate decision to reduce the transparency of official military information released to the public. Blasko gave this example: “From 1998 to 2019, China released ten official white papers on national defense, about one every 2-3 years. It has now been over seven years since the last white paper was released in July 2019. These white papers were essential to foreign understanding of China’s view of the international political environment, its defense policy and objectives, and, to a lesser extent, its force structure/organization and personnel system.”
Blasko said China has not even released an official number for the size of the active-duty PLA (or the People’s Armed Police militia, for that matter); the PLA reserve force; the expanding non-active-duty, uniformed civilian contingent; any of the four services; or four support forces (Joint Logistics Support, Aerospace, Cyberspace and Information Support Forces).
With the above mention of the PLA reserve force, it is necessary to mention that the CMC fundamentally restructured the PLA reserves system between 2020 and 2023.
ANI asked Joshua Arostegui, the Research Director of the China Landpower Studies Center at the US Army War College’s Strategic Research and Assessment Department, about this.
He explained that these reforms “eliminated the PLA reserve force’s legacy dual-command structure with local governments to establish direct, centralized military authority”. He continued: “Governed by the 2022 Reserve Personnel Law, the PLA transitioned from a mass territorial defense model to a highly responsive ‘equip-train-mobilize’ framework focused on technologically proficient veterans and civilian specialists. Modern reservists now process through dedicated training bases to fill specialized operational vacancies directly within active-duty units, ensuring frontline forces maintain continuous baseline readiness during predictable conscription cycle troughs.”
Furthermore, Arostegui said, “To resolve the remaining challenge of enforcing corporate compliance and preventing civilian personnel flight, the August 2026 revision of the National Defense Mobilization Law introduced unprecedented coercive authorities under a unified ‘backup manpower’ framework.”
This revised law strips commercial employers of discretion, mandates the rapid execution of call-up notices, and institutes strict geographic movement controls that prohibit preassigned personnel from leaving their registered domiciles during a crisis.”
Arostegui also highlighted that “the PLA’s rollout of a chip-enabled PLA reserve personnel identification card in March 2026 enforces these statutory mandates, creating the digital infrastructure required to precisely track the geographic location, combat readiness and specialized skill sets of its reserve pool in real time”.
The overall picture is of a PLA that has become leaner, more modern and more capable in the past decade. Serious structural changes have been enacted, whole new types of digital forces created, and the reserve force streamlined to strengthen the active-duty army. It all makes one wonder why Xi places so much importance on the PLA being ready to go into combat at the drop of a hat.